George Jones, Mama, and Me

My mother was not a country girl. She was a Brooklyn girl, born and raised in Flatbush, and then a Long Island girl, who liked shopping, "a little glitter" in her clothes, and keeping secret the actual color of her hair, which from the day I was born to the day she died, was the "platinum blonde" of Jean Harlow's. She should have liked the music my father liked, and sometimes sang—the music of the big bands and the crooners. She didn't. She hated Sinatra, probably because my father loved him and emulated him and sang his songs. What she liked—what she loved—was country music, which my father called "hillbilly music," and wouldn't allow her to play in the house. She loved it enough to love it in secret, loved it enough to make her love of it worthy of a country-music song, and loved it enough to harbor crushes on the men who sang it—particularly Johnny Cash and George Jones.

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Now, I was one of those kids who grew up privy to both his parents' secrets, who acted as the intermediary between them and eased their estrangements: that was my function in the household. But there was no family secret that embarrassed me more than my mother's love of country music, and particularly her ardor for the men who sang it. When my father was away on business trips—and he was the kind of man frequently away on business trips—she used to tune her radio to WHN, which was the one New York station that played country music, and slip downstairs to watch "The Johnny Cash Show" and even occasionally, God help us, "Hee Haw." I remember George Jones singing on television, but not any of the songs he sang. What I remember was my visceral reaction to him, the intensity of my distaste. Frank Sinatra I could tolerate, even love, because he was one of us. Johnny Cash I could respect as The Man In Black. But George Jones? He had bad hair. He had bad skin. He told bad jokes. He sang songs about the very things my mother detested in my father, drinking and cheating. Before I knew the words of any of his songs, I knew that he was called "No Show Jones," for his habit of getting drunk and not being able to get up on stage. I wasn't just repulsed by him and his truckstop vibe; he scared me. And yet when she saw him or heard him sing, my mother not only went misty-eyed, but looked, suddenly, younger; and when I asked, "Mom, how can you like this guy?", she'd always say the same thing.

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"Because his songs tell stories."

I didn't listen to any of those stories for a long time. I didn't listen to them, indeed, until I moved to the South, and found Southern friends. It's easy to talk about the "homogenization of the South," unless you're a Yankee and live here; then you find that the place remains alien, in the precise way that George Jones himself remained alien, and is still full of songs and stories. The fact is, you can't have Southern friends without eventually wanting to sing with them, and without eventually learning that the only way to sing with them is to make your peace with country music. I started singing with a couple of guitar-playing boys from Alabama about 15 years ago, and for some reason expected Frank Sinatra—and a band-singer named Lou Junod—to come pouring out. Instead, what came forth was the sound of my mother Fran, who could not sing, and the songs of George Jones, who could, but whose voice gave me the willies, then and now. Indeed, a long time ago, when I told my father that I was trying to sing, he gave me one piece of advice: "If what you're singing raises the hair on your arms, you know it's good. If it doesn't, you know it's not." I've tried singing a lot of songs since then, and it is surely one of the ironies of my existence that the only song that reliably raises the hair on my arms when I'm singing it is a song no one but George Jones could actually sing: "He Stopped Loving Her Today."

I know very little about George Jones, except that he drank and cheated, that he was called "Ole Possum," and that he was married to Tammy Wynette and then he wasn't. I was supposed to go see him in Atlanta last week with my guitar-playing friend from Alabama, but of course "No Show Jones" went and got sick and cancelled the damned thing. And this morning, when my guitar-playing friend from Alabama called to say to George Jones had up and died, he told me the story of going to see Bobby Braddock last year, and, since this is the South, he told me the story of Bobby Braddock telling a story. Braddock had written "He Stopped Loving Her Today," for George Jones, but Jones, Braddock said, struggled mightily to get it right in the studio, until Tammy came by, and stood on the other side of the glass of the recording booth. He sang the song to her through the glass, and that take, Braddock said, "was the one we kept."

I have no idea if that story is true, or needs to be. I will tell you a story I know to be true, or at least true enough to be a country song. A few years ago, when both my mother and father were still alive, I was driving my mother around Atlanta, with the country music station on the radio. She didn't have to hide her love her love for country music anymore, and I no longer hated it, and when "He Stopped Loving Her Today" came on, I was eager to tell her that she had been right about it, all along. I never got the chance. When George Jones began to sing, she turned away, and said, "Imagine—being loved like that." She was in her late eighties, but when I saw her face again, she was misty-eyed, and she looked only about as old as her dreams. My heart broke; it broke for her broken heart, for I knew what she knew, that her life would end without her ever being loved as she should have been, the way George Jones would have. It didn't matter what he looked like, or even sounded like; he had told her the story of a man who loved a woman till he died, and she knew it was a song that George Jones could sing, and a singer like Frank Sinatra—or, for that matter, my father—would never even try.